By John Molloy
THE economic consequences of Donald Trump’s language on tariffs is being considered by all the countries who trade with the US and the implications for the world economy obsessively debated in the media. While of course, if fulfilled, the effects of these White House announcements are huge, the modern need to fill a 24-hour news cycle is also at play, largely ignoring that much of what is happening, initially, at least are: parts of a negotiation; fulfil the stated desire of Trump strategists to distract and overwhelm opposition on a range of issues by “flooding the zone” and most importantly, however concluded, are the far from novel attempt of US Capital to maintain its dominant place in the world.
Significantly, as always, the blips of an economic “bloodbath” on a stock market screen will generate more corporate media coverage and anxiety in the West than a host of Governments complicity in an actual bloodbath, that the continuing Zionist slaughter of the Palestinian people represents. British Prime Minister Keir Stammer has said that the UK Government “will do everything necessary to protect Britain’s national interest” and that he was ready to use “industrial policy to shelter businesses”. While of course, US economic policy will have real-life, material consequences for millions of people, it’s telling that the initial ambition of this “labour” leader is to act protectively towards business. This could see state intervention that is normally claimed to be impossible and “fiscal rules” that mere days ago we were told were carved in stone, now appearing remarkably elastic. In other words, exposed as the fiction we always knew them to be. Similar to the rescue of the banks after the financial crash, these interventions are about saving a system, not the population who continue to be victims of it. The mainstream debate around “what next?” therefore continues the deflection from stating the truth about capitalism and its poison – whether delivered with a “tariff” or as part of new “free trade” arrangements. Indeed, in terms of nothing new under the sun, much of the daily mainstream “noise” about “what’s best” recalls the perpetual victims of the “great money trick” – the “ragged trousered philanthropists” – delusionally arguing over which capitalist model would help them most. If those are the facts and in Starmer’s words “the world as we know it has gone” how might this affect our “work” to not just “interpret” this world but “change” it?
A useful starting point is that, because it is our enemies’ who have declared “all bets are off” and they who are subverting their own “rules” of what it is 2 possible – our demands, our exposure and rejection of previous traditional social democratic shackles should also be bolder. This is essential as, to not do so, reinforces the ideological limitations (as Mark Fisher among others pointed out) that left many people believing it “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. But now that we are seeing behind the curtain of what “no future” capitalism offers – permanent austerity and “forever wars”, it reinforces the importance of wider political education that drives home the message that it doesn’t have to be like this. While some sites of struggle may be local and involve defence/restoration of workers’ rights once thought won for ever, other solutions will involve developing a longer-term internationalist perspective from studying: the historic advance that the Soviet Union and its allies represented and considering what we can learn from the analysis and practice offered by the Chinese Communist Party